boto

One of the reasons that Eucalyptus works as comparatively well as it does is because the QA behind the scenes is tremendous. There’s a lot of resources behind the scenes, constantly running tests against various Eucalyptus builds, to make sure that behaviors are stable.

Still, it’s impossible to have too much QA. You can always use more QA, and you can always use more tools for QA. Which is why the eutester framework is exciting to me: it’s the first legitimate opportunity to involve Eucalyptus users in a meaningful testing process.

Basically, it’s a testing framework that harnesses euca2ools+boto+paramiko (ssh2 for python) to run automated tests against Eucalyptus instances — or, with minimal modification, AWS instances. It’s dead simple, and over time I believe will prove to be incredibly extensible.

Here’s a good example of an early bit of code. You don’t really even need to know Python to follow it.

So if you’re running a Eucalyptus instance, take Eutester for a spin. Swing by IRC and let us know if it works for you, and if you’d like to see some use cases added. If you can write them yourself (and it’s not rocket science), even better.

Actually, Mitch Garnaat has written a bunch of stuff. He wrote boto, the excellent Python library that talks to AWS-based backends, and on top of that he wrote euca2ools, which is the free software client of choice worldwide for sending management commands to AWS, and to Eucalyptus, and to OpenStack Nova (well, the parts that have been written yet, anyway.)

Now he’s written an actual book about how to manage your AWS instances with Python and Boto.

I would argue that Mitch Garnaat is the authoritative voice on AWS command line management tools, and this book cements the place that he has already claimed for himself.